Such a digested, kaolinized, desilicated rock as we would naturally look for we find in the porphyry near the contact; and its condition there, so different from what it is remote from the contact, seems to indicate an exposure to local and decomposing influences, such indeed as a hot chemical solution forced up from below along the plane of contact would furnish.

It is difficult to understand why the upper portions of the porphyry sheet should be so different in character, so solid and homogeneous, with no local concentrations or pockets of ore, if they have been exposed to the same agencies as those which have so changed the under surface.

Accepting all the facts reported by Mr. Emmons, and without questioning the accuracy of any of his observations, or depreciating in any degree the great value of the admirable study he has made of this difficult and interesting field, his conclusion in regard to the source of the ore cannot yet be insisted on as a logical necessity.  In the judgment of the writer, the phenomena presented by the Leadville ore deposits can be as well or better accounted for by supposing that the plane of contact between the limestone and porphyry has been the conduit through which heated mineral solutions coming from deep seated and remote sources have flowed, removing something from both the overlying and underlying strata, and by substitution depositing sulphides of lead, iron, silver, etc., with silica.

The ore deposits of Tybo and Eureka in Nevada, of the Emma, the Cave, and the Horn Silver [1] mines in Utah, have much in common with those of Leadville, and it is not difficult to establish for all of the former cases a foreign and deep seated source of the ore.  The fact that the Leadville ore bodies are sometimes themselves excavated into chambers, which has been advanced as proof of the falsity of the theory here advocated, has no bearing on the question, as in the process of oxidation of ores which were certainly once sulphides, there has been much change of place as well as character; currents of water have flowed through them which have collected and redeposited the cerusite in sheets of “hard carbonate” or “sand carbonate,” and have elsewhere produced accumulations of kerargyrite, perhaps thousands of years after the deposition of the sulphide ores had ceased and the oxidation had begun.  In the leaching and rearrangement of the ore bodies, nothing would be more natural than that accumulations in one place should be attended by the formation of cavities elsewhere.

[Footnote 1:  The Horn Silver ore body lies in a fault fissure between a footwall of limestone and a hanging wall of trachyte, and those who consider the Leadville ores as teachings of the overlying porphyry would probably also regard the ore of the Horn Silver mine as derived from the trachyte hanging wall; but three facts oppose the acceptance of this view, viz., let, the trachyte, except in immediate contact with